The present invention relates to a card processing apparatus and method for processing a magnetic card.
Generally, magnetic card processing machines for processing magnetic information of magnetic cards for use in, e.g., railway stations and distribution are required to be able to easily and stably process these cards. On the other hand, a magnetic card processing system having sufficient protecting ability is being desired to prevent a third party from easily reading, decoding, and altering recorded information.
Conventionally, therefore, magnetic card processing systems have been proposed which prevent a third party from easily reading, decoding, and altering recorded information by forming a multilayered recording magnetic layer by using materials having different magnetic characteristics. However, none of these systems have sufficient protecting ability because the characteristics of magnetic materials used are not largely different.
That is, in the conventionally proposed systems, a card is coated with, e.g., two layers made from a high-coercive force material (3,000 Oe: oersted) and a low-coercive force material (300 Oe), and different kinds of information are recorded in the high- and the low-coercive force layers, respectively. However, this coercive force difference is actually too small to stably record the independent pieces of information in the high- and the low-coercive force recording magnetic materials. Consequently, these kinds of information interfere with each other, or it is essentially possible to rewrite the information.
Accordingly, the conventional magnetic cards can be forged and altered.